Since 2012 or so Microsoft is pushing concept of running Windows Server headless without GUI and administering everything through PowerShell. I remember sitting through countless TechEd / Ignite sessions year after year and all I could see were blue PowerShell command prompts everywhere. No more wizards and forms, MMC and GUI based administration is suddenly thing of a past. Just take a look at Server Core, WinPE, Nano, PS Remoting, Windows SSH server and Recovery Console. Even System Center is a front end for PowerShell. Nowadays everything seems to be text mode.

This overall is good news and great improvement since previous generations of Windows, but what if you need to create or edit a PowerShell, CMD script or some config file?

Oooops, looks like you are screwed. Seems that Redmond forgot to include most crucial tool in sysadmins job – a simple text mode editor. WTF Microsoft?

So, are there any 3rd party alternatives? Yes, and there are and quite a few of them! Unfortunately none are perfect. This article aims to be a grand tour of whatever is available out there.

Note that throughout the article I will be repeatedly referring to a “portable” editor, that for me means single .exe file that can be carried around on a USB pen drive or network share. I also cry a lot about 64bit Windows build because I work a lot in WinPE and other environments where syswow64 is not available.

First lets start with most obvious choices well known through intertubes. If you search for a Windows Console Editor VIMand Emacswill naturally pop up first. These editors don’t need any introduction or praising. I use VIM every day and Emacs every now and then. These two had ports to Windows for as long as I can remember and in terms of quality and stability definitely up top. The problem is that both are completely foreign and just plain unusable to a typical Windows user and learning curve is pretty steep. Also portability suffers a lot at least for Emacs. Both editors come with hundreds of supporting files and are massive in size. Emacs.exe binary is whooping 83 MB in size and the zip file contains two of them just in case. Whole unpacked folder is 400 MB. Thats biggern than W

Emacs on Windows Console

VIM is fortunately much much better you can extract single vim.exe binary from the package and use it without much complaints.

VIM on Windows Console

When talking about about VI and Emacs hard not to mention some more historical versions. Emacs’ little brother MicroEmacs has been available for Windows since earliest days. I’m not going to attempt to link to any particular one since there are so many flavors.

MicroEmacs

VIM little brother VI also comes in different shapes and forms. Lets take look at a few.

Stevie is a very special case. Rumor has it, this editor played crucial role in development of Windows NT itself or has been used since earliest days of NT as part of the private SDK. If you could ever look at Windows source code I’d bet you could probably find it buried inside. Because it was ported by folks at Redmond the quality should be pretty good. Unfortunately README states “this is an incomplete VI that has not been fully tested. Use at your own risk.”. For a historical note according to Wikipedia, Stevie port to Amiga has been used by Bram Moolenaar as a base source code for VIM.

Stevie for Windows aka NT VI

One particularly interesting case is VI editor from Watcom compiler suite. It has very nice TUI known from MS-DOS editors, syntax highlighting and online help. One of nicest versions of VI available for Windows. Small portable and just all around handy editor. This is probably my main to go text editor when working on WinPE or Server Core. Unfortunately not very well known. I hope it can gain some popularity it deserves.

OpenWatcom VI Editor

I don’t want this article to be all about VI and Emacs clones. Let this nice color menus be a segue to more native Windows / DOS editors at least departing from hardcore keystrokes and Unix.

For a change in theme lets look at SemWare TSE Pro, the editor that originally started a QEDIT for DOS and OS/2. It has most advanced features one could ever imagine for a text mode editor. Including resizable windows, hex editor, macros and spell checker. I really wish I could use it in everyday’s life. Unfortunately TSE has some drawbacks, it lacks portable version and install is little cumbersome. It also doesn’t have 64bit version which is a problem for WinPE. The biggest problem however is a license which runs $100 per user. I can’t imagine installing it on hundreds of Windows servers.

SemWare TSE Pro

Next one up is Brief. It used to be very popular in it’s own time and sparked quite bit of following as there are numerous of editors being “brief style”. It’s a nice and small console based text editor. It comes in two versions basic (free) and professional (paid). The pro version supports splitting in to multiple windows regexp and unicode. Unfortunately it runs at $120 per user and there is no 64bit build or a portable edition.

Brief

There also is an open source clone of Brief called GRIEF. Flipping through the manual it has very impressive set of features including $120 windowing feature and macros. Unfortunately it’s rather unportable due to large amount of dll and other files. 64bit build could probably be made if someone wanted.

GRIEF free Brief Clone

As we talk about less costly options there is Kinesics Text Editor aka KIT. It’s more well known if you search on google, completely free and after installing you can find and a x64 binary file! This makes it somewhat portable and able to run in WinPE for instance. Until recently the editor did not have 64bit version so I did not have chance to use it much in practice but the TUI appears to have a well rounded easy to use (F1 or right mouse click brings menus). It does’t seem to have any advanced features but it’s very stable and actively maintained. And frankly this is what matters for editing on the console. It may actually be the right missing Windows console editor.

Kinesics aka KIT

Another one is Minimum Profit. It’s fully open source and it supports a lot of platforms in both windowing and text mode. It has a lot of interesting features such as syntax highlighting, spell checked and menus. It can’t be easily made portable as it needs a lot of files of it’s own scripting language. There is no Win64 build by default but one could probably make it with Mingw64. I also find that screen refresh is somewhat funky.

Minimum Profit

Lets look at somewhat well know FTE. It’s a very nice text editor available on many platforms such QNX, OS/2 and of course Windows. It has nice TUI, split windows, syntax highlighting, folding, bookmarks and tools for HTML authoring etc. Overall awesome editor falling short only to TSE. Support for NT console has been available since 1997. I have recently fixed couple of bugs and built a 64bit portable version.

FTE Editor

One could also not forget Borland Turbo C IDE. Apparently there is an open source clone of the IDE as a regular editor called SETEdit. It’s multi platform editor with MS-DOS style windows and menus. Syntax highlighting macros and all regular amenities. Looks like DOS version can play MP3 songs while you code. There is a native WinNT build made with BCPP. To run on Windows you install the DOS version then overwrite dos exe file win NT exe. The editor is absolutely awesome, unfortunately currently doesn’t work in a portable manner and there is no x64 binary. However as it’s open source it could be probably made.

SETEdit a Borland Turbo C IDE Clone

When talking about MS-DOS style windows, Norton Commander like file managers come to mind. There is one particular built specifically for Windows – FAR Manager. Written by author of WinRAR, originally shareware, but since 2007 it has been released under BSD license. FAR does come with a built in text editor hence it’s featured here. It’s actively supported and developed, and because it’s designed from ground up for Windows, it’s probably most stable and trustworthy of all applications in this post. I normally don’t use it that much, but I do keep a copy of it lying around when I need to do some more heavy lifting from Windows console. There is a 64bit binary by default but unfortunately FAR can be hardly made portable as it comes with 400 files.

FAR Manager Text Editor

When talking about Norton Commander clones lets not forget Midnight Commander, which does have an unofficial native Windows console build called mcwin32. Similar to FAR, MC has a very nice built-in text editor. MC overall seems far nicer than FAR but because it’s multi platform rather than WIndows specific and not officially supported I don’t trust it as much for day to day use.

GNU Midnight Commander

When on topic of Unix, lets talk about GNU Nano. In it’s native habitat, it’s very popular and stable editor making it a perfect choice for a text mode console. Unfortunately Windows port is lacking quite a lot, especially for things like resizing Window or handling file names. The official build looks like a fusion of cygwin, mingw, pdcurses and other horrible stuff. Version that comes with Mingw/MSYS is not portable and so far I failed in attempts to build a static windows binary by hand. Nano predecessor UW Pico unfortunately never did have console terminal Windows port. Authors of Pine decided to make it semi graphical application with it’s own window, menus and buttons. Sad story for both Pico and Nano. Hopefully one day someone will make a 100% native Windows port.

Another non-vi and non-emacs Unix editor with Windows console port is JED. Frankly I have not used JED that much in the past although I did play with it in the 90s. This is the original web page of Jed editor. It does seem to have menus and multi windows. Unfortunately doesn’t look like it can be easily made in to a portable image.

JED Win32 Port

Yet another more obscure editor is ED-NT which is DEC EDT clone. Unfortunately seems to be completely dead an unmaintained. Sources are still available through archive.org so perhaps it could be still looked after if someone wanted EDT editor on Windows.

ED-NT

When going through obscurities via archive.org one can also mention ZABED and more specifically Z95 which is a 32bit console version. I don’t know anything about the editor and I’m little too lazy to play with it extensively although pdf manual is available. Probably little too old and too obscure for every day use.

Z95

Thanks to Andreas Kohl I have learned about X2 Programmers Editor which also has NT console version. The editor seems very nice and has extensive help, syntax highlighting, etc. Unfortunately I have never used this editor before. Last version has been released in 2008 which is not loo long ago but sadly there has been no update since. I hope the author will continue to maintain it.

X2 Programmers Editor

Andreas also brought up Personal Editor, which comes as PE32 and PE64. Looks like really well maintained and stable editor designed and developed specifically for Windows. 64bit bit version is really cool however the editor doesn’t seem to be portable and $40 license will probably prevent me from using it professionally in environments where I would need it. Never the less looks like a very fine editor!

Another find is e3 editor. Pretty interesting stuff. It’s written in assembler and available on many operating systems including DOS and Windows. Looks like it’s still maintained as last version was released in 2016. It supports multiple modes, Wordstar, Emacs, Vi, Pico and Nedit by renaming or linking the main executable. It’s definitely portable as it doesn’t need any extra files and the exe is just 20KB (take that emacs!). Unfortunately because of assembler I don’t think there will be a 64bit release any time soon. Overall seem to be really cool to keep this one around.

e3 editor

A really cool last minute find is public domain TDE – Thomson-Davis Editor. Released not so long ago in 2007 it has 16, 32bit DOS and 32bit Windows console executable. It has DOS style menus,syntax highlighting, resizable windows and bunch of other features. Looks like a very handy editor. I don’t know how did I miss it. Since source code was available so I was able to make a x64 build. This is really untested so use at your own risk!

TDE

Also a recent find – shareware editor called Aurora. I never had a chance to use it in the past but after taking it for a quick spin I fell in love. The text mode UI it feels like it’s own windowing operating system! Originally for DOS, Unix and OS/2, Win32 port is relatively new. Unfortunately it’s no longer maintained or even sold. This is very sad because the editor is extremely cool. I hope the author may be willing to release the source code so it could be maintained.

Aurora

Last but not least, a new kid on the block, is Micro. It’s a modern times editor for all platforms including Windows. It looks really cool and seem to have all recent amenities from editors such as Sublime Text or Atom. Multi windows, syntax highlighting and even it’s own built in terminal emulator for running a subshell. Micro is 100% portable and comes in as a single x64 exe file. It’s 10 MB size but I think well worth keeping around. Unfortunately it doesn’t have built-in file browser. Yes, there is a plugin for it but I don’t know how to use it. Also seems to have issues with Windows style path names. However I’m really happy that a new editor has been developed in recent times. It has a great chance of becoming the missing Windows text mode editor for the future! Definitely worth keeping an eye on it.

Micro Editor

With this positive news it’s time to wrap up. To summarize there currently is no perfect text mode editor for Windows. I hope that Microsoft can one day step up and provide one, especially for PowerShell environment. In the mean time I usually stick around to OpenWatcom VI and FAR Manager. For people who do not wish to learn VI, Kinesics KIT may probably be the most perfect editor in short term and Micro in the future. I also hope someone can make a good GNU Nano port using native Win32 APIs without going to pdcurses and cygwin.

Have I forgotten or missed any editor? Please let me know and I will promptly add it to the list! Note: please do not include editors that work under Cygwin.

Got this fun one in dwarf.c (and probably many others) while building an ELF toolchain from Linux to run on Windows to target.. Linux. Anyways I think this is a symptom of Canadian Cross compilers.

So a little digging and ___eprintf turns out to be from the assert.h as macros for assert depend on this being in libgcc.a .. And yeah, MinGW uses something else. So just copy the assert.h from MinGW, and re-build and away it works.

time in parse: 1.155000
time in integration: 0.000000
time in jump: 0.000000
time in cse: 0.000000
time in loop: 0.000000
time in cse2: 0.000000
time in flow: 0.000000
time in combine: 0.000000
time in sched: 0.000000
time in local-alloc: 0.000000
time in global-alloc: 0.000000
time in sched2: 0.000000
time in dbranch: 0.000000
time in shorten-branch: 0.000000
time in stack-reg: 0.000000
time in final: 0.000000
time in varconst: 0.000000
time in symout: 0.000000
time in dump: 0.000000

This talk explains how individuals were able to communicate globally in the 1990ies using self-organized networks of BBSsin networks like FIDO and Z-Netz, before individual access to the Internet was possible. It also covers the efforts of non-profit organizations to provide individual access to Internet Mail+News via UUCP and later via IP during that period.

This talk covers how individuals could participate in local, regional and global message-based data communications in the 1990ies. It covers the technologies used to access such networks, both on the infrastructure (BBS) side, as well as on the user/client side.

At the same time, the talk is a bit of a personal journey from

accessing dial-up BBSs using accoustinc coupler and modem

becoming CoSysop of a BBS and learning about how to operatie BBSs

being a Node/Point in message based communications networks like Z-Netz and FIDO

using UUCP to participate in Internet mail/news (Usenet)

working in the technical team of Kommunikationsnetz Franken e.V. to set up a community-based ISP with modem and ISDN dial-up banks, satellite based Usenet feeds, analog leased lines ISDN-SPV.

helping getting Germany’s alleged first Internet Cafe (we then called it an Online Bistro) connected

I never was able to know anyone close enough to do fun stuff like back to back DSL modems, or even in this day & age run fiber optics, do ATM or anything fun like that. As they say telecoms always break down at the last mile, or in my case the first mile.

Sure I can cross compile Linux, but what about 386BSD? This had long been a thorn in my side, as the GCC/Binutil toolchain that is used in this early era is not GNU pure, they had been modified in all kinds of ways. One of which was a builtin memcpy that doesn’t work the same as a normal memcpy, and the other being that the C compiler & pre-processor rely in YACC to build the tokens. I had been using bison before, however even though bison didn’t generate any errors it build the compiler wrong enough that the majority of the kernel wouldn’t compile.

As it stands right now, the only things that do not compile is locore

to post process the kernel, symorder is used along with dbsym, although neither do any processing to the kernel file itself, so they aren’t needed to get a working system.

386BSD Release 0.1 by William and Lynne Jolitz.
Copyright (c) 1989,1990,1991,1992 William F. Jolitz. All rights reserved.
Based in part on work by the 386BSD User Community and the
BSD Networking Software, Release 2 by UCB EECS Department.
386BSD 0.1.2018 (GENERICISA) 02/02/18 15:01

Other than that, yeah it’s great, compile a kernel in under 15 seconds.

So after nearly 8 years ago from messing around with UnixWare, I wanted to confirm something from a SYSV Unix that has a C compiler that isn’t GCC, and I remembered I have UnixWare 7.1.1 from a long time ago. Anyways I have long since lost the virtual machine I had installed onto, but I still have media and of course the more important licenses.

UnixWare licenses. the dread of fixing things 20+ years later

Yep it’s the real thing. So with my certs in hand I do an initial install in Qemu and on reboot the system basically has bricked itself.

WARNING: System is in an unreliable state.

And then looking at the licenses it turns out that my license has expired. What?

Somehow I got lucky before, but it turns out that the installation process for ancient UnixWare is NOT Y2K compliant! And this actually turned out to be a known issue. I can’t find the original article, but a mirror is here: ischo.net

So basically install using an eval license, which will of course expire on install, and then use your actual license after the installation, remove the eval, reboot and all will be well.

Although you can’t boot up in any real useful state, the networking will kick people off, and it’ll constantly complain that you are in license violation, you can at least bring up the SCO Admin tool, and add in your actual licenses, and then delete the evals.

And now we’re good!

Ok, now for the real fun part, flags and how to run with kvm/qemu. Since I was loading this onto a server for remote access something like this works fine for me as I’m using the VNC remote console.

So the key things are to restrict the CPU level, and I’ve deferred the network configuration so I can update network drivers, and the OS. I’ve found that by doing the networking during the install resulted in an OS that crashed with an integer divide by zero after installing the fixpack 5.

Once you have UnixWare 7.1.1 installed, be sure to install Maintenance Pack 5, which is thankfully still online over at sco.com I’d also recommend to do this in single user mode, you can enter single user mode by hitting a key during the boot logo and typing in:

INITSTATE=S
boot

And you’ll boot in single user mode, and can install the Maintenance pack with ease. Until the maintenance pack is installed, expect poor stability, and the system won’t actually listen to the real time clock device, and it’ll accelerate the clock like crazy where I was passing an hour every minute or two.

Adding the AMD PCnet on UnixWare

Once the install and update is done, I just added a PCI network card (So older versions of Qemu work well with the ne2k_isa, but newer work much better with the AMD PCNet card.), which is a popular choice for both machines and VM’s of the era. Although you can use SLiRP the built in NAT for Qemu/KVM alternatively you can also use tun/tap. I tried to enable SMP, however it has issues binding to the other processors, although it does see them. And this is better to give full access to the network stack for fun things like FTP, NFS and whatnot.

Also I found an eval serial for SMP, but it doesn’t recognize the second processor after the boot.

# psrinfo -v
Status of processor 0 as of 01/31/18 16:40:07
Processor has been on-line since 01/31/18 16:13:57.
The Pentium processor has a i387 floating point processor.
The following conditions exist:
Device drivers are bound to this processor.

I’ll try apparently this as for some reason it doesn’t detect the MP in Qemu/KVM so it never installed the osmp driver.

Introduction

I’ve recently defeated one of my bigger inconveniences, broken DEL as backspace on the UNIX®† operating system, Seventh Edition (commonly known as UNIX V7 or just V7). However, I’ve had another pet peeve for a while: How much manual labor is involved in booting the system. Reader DOS found out that SIMH recently added support for SEND/EXPECT pairs to react to output from the simulator. Think of them like UUCP chat scripts, effectively. This can be used to automate the bootup procedure.

Yet DOS’s script skips over a part of the bootup procedure that can be fully automated with some additional tooling. Namely, setting the date/time to the current time as defined by the host system. As per boot(8), the operator is meant to set the date/time every time the system is brought up. This should be possible to automate, right?

Setting the Date Automatically

date(1) itself does not support setting years past 2000, so we need custom code in any case. SIMH, fortunately, also provides a way to get the current timestamp in the form of %UTIME%, which is interpreted in any argument to any command. I’ve thus written a utility called tsdate that takes a timestamp as argument and sets the current time to be that timestamp. I put the executable in /etc/tsdate, but there’s really no reason to do so other than not wanting to accidentally call it. Once tsdate is in place, changing DOS’s script slightly will already do the trick:

expect "\n\r# " send "/etc/tsdate %UTIME%\r\004"; c

This approach already has a minor amount of time drift ab initio, namely the difference between the actual time on the host system and the UNIX timestamp. In the worst case, this may be very close to 1. If for some reason you need higher accuracy than this, you’ll probably have a fairly hard time. I could imagine some kind of NTP-over-serial, but you’d need support for chat scripts to get past the authentication due to getty(8) spawning login(1).

The system is not suitable for usage past the year 2038. However, you can at least push it back until around 2100 by changing the internal representation of time to be an unsigned long instead of simply a long. time_t was not used systematically. Instead, everything assumed long as the type for times. This assumption is in a lot of places in userspace and even the man pages use long instead of time_t.

If you overflow tsdate’s timestamp, you’ll just get whatever happens when atol(3) overflows. There’s nothing in the standard library for parsing strings into unsigned long and the year 2038 is far enough away that I didn’t want to bother. stime(2) would presumably also need to be adjusted.

Year 2000 Compatibility in the System

V7 is surprisingly good at handling years past 2000. Most utilities can print years up to and including 2099 properly. Macros for nroff(1)/troff(1), however, are blissfully unaware that years past 1999 may exist. This causes man pages to be supposedly printed in the year 19118. The root cause for this is that the number register yr only holds the current year minus 1900. Patches to the -ms and -man macros are required. Similarly, refer(1) only considers years until 2000 to be actual years, though I did not bother patching that since it should only affect keyword matching.

Leap year handling is broken in two different places due to wrong leap year handling: at(1) and the undocumented dysize() function, used by date(1) as well as inside /usr/src/libc/gen/ctime.c for various purposes. This affects the standard library, so recompiling the entire userland is recommended. Because the calculation is just a naïve division by four, it actually works on the year 2000 itself. A year is a leap year, i.e. has February 29, if a year is:

a multiple of 4, and

not a multiple of 100, or

a multiple of 400.

Leap seconds are also not accounted for, but that comes to nobody’s surprise. Leap seconds just add a second 60 to the usual 00-59, so they don’t hurt doing date calculations on timestamps unless precisely on a leap second. For my purposes, they can be ignored.

Note that I haven’t gone through the system with a fine-toothed comb. There can always be more subtle time/date issues remaining in the system. For my purposes, this works well enough. If other things crop up, you’re welcome to put them in the comments for future generations.

The Good Stuff

There’s really not much to it. Applying diff and recompilation of the affected parts is left as an exercise for the reader.

Stuff like this drives me crazy. Once upon a time everything was statically linked, there were no DLL’s, and all exe’s had a lot of the same code in them, and people realized that the majority of a hard disk could literally contain the same thing over and over. Not to mention that if you were to fix some bug in say, LIBC you would have to re-compile everything. So we entered the brave new world of dynamic linking where we now live in the proverbial DLL hell, that although we did save space, we have things where slight variations in the same DLL can break things in unforeseen ways. People have tried various things such as weak linking, Side by side assemblies, Frameworks, and all kinds of things to try to keep things together.

Honestly it’s just easier to go back, and statically link things, and just re-build as needed.

common culprits of MinGW based stuff always include:

libwinpthread-1.dll

libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll

libstdc++-6.dll

ugh.

The hard one is the pthread library. If you try to link it statically it’ll try to link everything else statically and not every DLL can link statically (SDL*keep reading). But GCC / Binutils does have the option to turn various features on and off through the link string

As you can see, everything after “-Wl,-Bstatic” will be linked statically, while everything after “-Wl,-Bdynamic” will go back to being dynamically linked.

Ok, that is great but what about SDL, you may ask. Well sure it’s a DLL, but even DLL’s come from somewhere. Download the source, build it yourself and you can directly link the objects that make up the DLL. In version 1.2.15 they live in the .libs directory.